Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)

What must it do to the human male ego to find out that the young woman who just handily won an online game of checkers is actually a sleek piece of software with no real understanding of the game's rules? Evolutionary programmers David B. Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla learned this and many other lessons in their quest to build a problem-solver divorced from human expertise. Fogel's book Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI captures their spirit of good-natured questioning of the received wisdom of traditional checkers playing and AI research.

The writing is surprisingly engaging, coming from a software researcher; even readers with little interest in checkers will follow Fogel's many game analyses with rising interest as his neural networks increase in prowess. Ever the scientist, he includes a laundry list of fairly harsh critiques of his work--with rebuttals--as an appendix. Devotees of cutting-edge AI, online psychology, or tournament-level checkers will find plenty of interest in the exploits of Blondie24. --Rob Lightner